Site Mobile Navigation

Benchmarks in Wartime: As Reliable as Promises

Politics A reduction of lawmakers’ seats, and Sunni representation, in their province brought protests last week in Iraq.Credit
Khalid Al-Mousuly/Reuters

BAGHDAD — Watching Iraq’s Parliament debate an election law last week, inside a conference center still decorated with mosaics ofSaddam Hussein’s wartime delusions, ought to have been reassuring to those who wish the country’s nascent democracy well. It wasn’t.

The impasse over the election — which is now almost certain to slip past a constitutional deadline set for January — has laid bare more than Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian fissures, which simmer never far from the surface. It has also exposed the unfinished business of building a democratic system, just as the United States begins to wrap up its military mission, and with it much of America’s influence.

As the Obama administration prepares to unveil a new set of “benchmarks” to measure political progress in Afghanistan — and to prod PresidentHamid Karzai to improve governance there as he anticipates more troops from America — Iraq’s experience can serve as a cautionary tale.

Adopting legislation to knit the country together; reforming the Constitution; strengthening independent security forces; reconciling Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — all were benchmarks, and all remain partly or wholly unmet, despite the security gains that were supposed to create the space for political progress and thus peace.

Instead, Iraqis treat their Constitution — like the benchmarks — the way they treat what few traffic lights operate here.

“So what?” a Kurdish lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman, said when asked about the risk of holding the election later than the Constitution demands. “Nothing in Iraq is very legitimate.”

As a matter of policy, there’s nothing wrong with prodding Iraq or Afghanistan toward reforms aimed at creating stable democratic government. Achieving them could hasten the withdrawal of American troops, which is clearly on Mr. Obama’s mind. Once Americans set a timetable to do so, however — as Mr. Obama is now under pressure to do for Afghanistan — momentum has a way of evaporating.

“It is time for us to transition to the Iraqis,” Mr. Obama said when he last visited Iraq. “They need to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty. And in order for them to do that, they have got to make political accommodations.”

But that was seven months ago, and little has changed. In fact, the coming election has paralyzed Iraq’s lawmakers because they seem less interested in accommodation than in jockeying for best advantage out of the rapidly changing rules that will govern the vote.

The postponing of a planned census — another unmet constitutional requirement — means that no one can even agree how many voters each lawmaker should represent or how seats should be apportioned. The Iraqis raised the number of seats in Parliament to 323 anyway, based on little more than a guess that Iraq’s population has grown to 32 million, from 27 million.

“It’s important to recognize how this kind of general constitutional and political immaturity is continuing to hamper progress in the Iraqi democracy,” said Reider Visser, an Iraq expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

Despite campaign oratory about reaching across sectarian and ethnic lines, the fight over the election has broken along those very lines. One of Iraq’s vice presidents, Tariq al-Hashimi, vetoed a much-delayed election law last month on grounds that the vote wouldn’t fairly represent Iraqis living abroad, most of them Sunnis.

Mr. Hashimi, a Sunni who told me not long ago that Iraq was now ready for historic reconciliation, was widely accused of acting in a purely sectarian way to ensure more votes for his bloc. The Parliament’s Shiite and Kurdish blocs promptly joined forces in last week’s session and, despite intense American lobbying, passed yet another election law that would reduce Sunni seats even more.

If there’s good news in Iraq’s election impasse, it’s that the conflict is still a political one. So far. The bad news is that politics in Iraq remain rooted in passions that turned violent the last time Iraq held a national election, in 2005.

“The election impasse demonstrates that the Sunni Arabs have not fundamentally reconciled themselves to their reduced stature in Iraq’s power structure,” Kenneth Katzman, an analyst at the Congressional Research Service in Washington, wrote in an e-mail message.

The new election was supposed to ameliorate Sunni grievances; now it threatens to revive the Sunnis’ sense of disenfranchisement and, perhaps, drive some back into the insurgency.

“It is highly likely that many Sunni Arabs will revert to the use of violence if they do not get what they perceive is their fair share of power and resources by participating in the legitimate political process,” Mr. Katzman wrote.

While that may seem pessimistic after the security successes of the last two years, a wealth of recent history shows that there is nothing inevitable about democratic transition.

The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in democracy from Eastern Europe to the Pacific — only to see the tide ebb as political leaders reverted to old instincts. Russia, Belarus and the Central Asian republics became authoritarian. Georgia splintered. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2005 has degenerated into an ethnically tinged political paralysis not unlike Iraq’s.

“Democracy, as I understand it, is not like a vehicle or a car,” Sami al-Askari, a senior member of Parliament close to Prime MinisterNuri Kamal al-Maliki, said. “Just buy a Mercedes or a B.M.W. and everyone can drive it, whether he is from Russia or Iraq. Democracy is a culture, based on culture, and culture needs time.”

Reviewing examples from Germany and Japan to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the authors wrote, “The record suggests that, while staying long does not guarantee success, leaving early ensures failure.”

But now the window for the United States to nurture Iraq’s democratic institutions — the Parliament, government ministries, political parties, independent courts — as the route for resolving disputes is rapidly closing. Mr. Obama has ordered the last combat troops out by August; a security agreement between Iraq and the United States says all must be out when 2011 ends. American influence is already waning.

When the American ambassador,Christopher R. Hill, went to Parliament on Sunday to lobby for a resolution over the election law, some deputies demanded he be barred from the building.

Rod Nordland contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 29, 2009, on Page WK1 of the New York edition with the headline: Benchmarks In Wartime: As Reliable As Promises. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe